Today, 29-year-old Sayfullo Saipov drove a rented Home Depot truck on a bicycle path on Manhattan, New York. With the vehicle he struck nearly two dozen bicyclers and pedestrians and then crashed it into a school bus. He killed eight people and injured eleven. The World Trade Center was located nearby. That suggests he did it as a symbolic act related to the 9/11 attack there. Witnesses say Saipov exited the vehicle shouting “Allahu Akbar,” the common Arabic expression meaning... Read more
The Gospel of John contains a motif about Jesus that nearly all scholars claim is a descending/ascending motif regarding heaven. That is partly because most scholars believe in the church teaching of the doctrine of the Trinity. Accordingly, as one of the three co-equal and co-eternal members of the Triune God, Jesus preexisted as God and came down to earth to become a man in what the church calls The Incarnation. By laying out this Johannine motif as Jesus first... Read more
Next Tuesday, on October 31, will be the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. It started with a dramatic act committed by Martin Luther on that day in 1517. He was an Augustinian monk in the Roman Catholic Church and a professor of Moral Theology at the University of Wittenberg, a city in Germany. He wrote and then published a brief paper called “Ninety-five Theses” or “Disputation on the Power of Indulgences.” It is popularly believed that he nailed this... Read more
Well, it’s old news by now, but I thought I would just say something about it anyway. Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake are going at it against President Donald Trump, and all three are Republicans. They are critical of him as president just as I have been on this blog for at least the past 18 months, with about 100 posts about it. Both Corker and Flake announced they will not seek re-election next year. Flake delivered a speech... Read more
As I last posted, this week former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush plus Senator John McCain delivered speeches in which they warned America about drifting from our historic moorings as a truly democratic nation that has done much good in the world. These obviously were critiques against the selfish nationalism of the politically far-right that has been adopted by President Donald Trump and his former chief political strategist Stephen Bannon without naming either of them. (See my previous... Read more
This week in the USA, two former presidents and one current senator delivered uncoordinated speeches that I thought were devastating blows against rising far-right nationalism. The speakers were Republican George W. Bush, Democrat Barack Obama, and Republican Senator John McCain, who is from my current hometown of metro-Phoenix. All three speeches obviously targeted that form of nationalism touted by current Republican President Donald Trump, if not also his recent chief political strategist Stephen Bannon, without naming them. The speeches were... Read more
Young, American Justin Thomas just won the inaugural CJ Cup on the PGA Tour at Nine Bridges in Jeju Island, South Korea. He defeated Australia’s Marc Leishman on the second hole of a sudden-death playoff. It was the 24-year old Thomas’ sixth win on the PGA Tour this calendar year, which is the most wins of anybody. It was the second event of the 2017-2018PGA Tour season. Thomas was surely the best player in the world in 2017. Weighing only 150... Read more
The short answer is “no.” Yet God does enter into the affairs of humankind here on earth. He does implement certain plans that he has for humans on earth right now. But these are isolated instances and thus not the norm. Yet there will come a day when God will control this planet and forever more. But until then, God does not control this world system, this cosmos, as some Christians think. Do you think I am out of my... Read more
Thursday, after eleven years of bitter separation, the two Palestinian groups that control Palestinians living in the Levant agreed to further their unification that began in 2014. With Egypt’s President El-Sisi as the reconciler, Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in Cairo saying that Fatah will continue to control Palestinians in the West Bank and now also those in the Gaza Strip through the Palestinian Authority until a unity government is formed by means of an election before year’s end.... Read more
NBC reported yesterday that President Donald Trump said to his military advisors in a Pentagon meeting on July 20 this year, “why doesn’t our nuclear arsenal look more like that?” He had just been shown material revealing that during the 1960s, the U.S. had something like 30,000 nuclear weapons due to its arms race with the Soviet Union. Nowadays, as a result of decades of nuclear disarmament agreements with the Soviet Union and then Russia, the Russians have a total... Read more
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